


Take Me To Broadchurch: A Meta Series

by PlaidAdder



Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-18 04:03:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7298803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I started watching Broadchurch, and inevitably started writing meta about it. ALL of these little meta pieces contain spoilers for all of Season 1 and they occasionally mention season 2. I wouldn't go any further unless you've seen all of season 1. SPOILERS. SPOILERS. SPOILERS. There. I have warned you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Middlemarch With Murder

  * After blasting through the first two seasons of _Broadchurch_ in about 4 days (this is why I am always reluctant to start a new show…once I get into a narrative, I don’t fuck around), I am now going back to rewatch them at a more leisurely pace. I will be posting the occasional meta about them. It’s all, obviously, going to contain massive spoilers. 

The fact that you can actually rewatch _Broadchurch_ and enjoy it, actually, in some ways more the second time around is one of the things that really makes this series stand out. _Broadchurch_ is very deeply rooted in the tradition of British crime fiction; it combines the closed environment and clue puzzle elements of the classic Agatha Christie mystery with the brooding, death-obsessed, melancholy omniscience that haunts the police procedurals of P. D. James. At the same time, like James herself, _Broadchurch_ slows down the mystery novel in order to accommodate old-fashioned techniques and pleasures with which most modern crime fiction dispenses: a richly textured sense of place, and detailed and nuanced character development.

Here are some thoughts on how this becomes even more apparent when you go back and watch Episode 1 of season one after you’ve already seen episodes 2-8. SPOILERS. SPOILERS. MY GOD, THE SPOILERS.

If you haven’t read P. D. James, and you like _Broadchurch_ , you should really look her up. My personal favorite is _Shroud for a Nightingale_ ; but I also fondly remember _A Taste For Death_. James’s main detective is Adam Dalgliesh, a reserved and introspective detective inspector who is also respected, amongst the literati, as a poet of some note. These novels are written from a third person perspective which often inhabits the heads of the characters–usually even, at some point, the killer’s–but which also sometimes pulls back to show us events that nobody has witnessed and things that the detective doesn’t know and may never find out. The effect is compelling and quite creepy, though also in a way reassuring: no matter how baffling the mystery may be to the human characters, there is some one or some thing who knows the solution–who knows everything. The fact that it occasionally gives us hints is not only tantalizing but, in its way, tragic; we get the prophecy, but it’s always either too early to mean anything to us or too late to prepare us for the shock of revelation. 

_Broadchurch_ basically translates this m.o. into film, giving us a kind of dual perspective: the limited one, which follows the characters around as they all live through the investigation, and the omniscient one which gives us glimpses of what happened the night Danny died. Episode 1 opens with a sequence of silent images from that night. The first time you see it, it is full of haunting and cryptic menace. When you go back and rewatch, it’s heartbreakingly simple. Some of these shots are from Danny’s perspective–the main street down which he skateboarded, the view over the edge of the cliff–but his absence from them, and the fact that we can’t hear anything except the soundtrack, erase Danny as completely as if he is already dead. Some of them are from the killer’s perspective (Danny at the edge of the cliff, turning around to see Joe behind him). And some are just from the God’s-eye-view: Danny’s parents sleeping with their backs to each other, Danny’s empty bedroom, the exterior shots of the silent and sleeping houses and the empty and impotent police station. 

Then, once Beth wakes up, we get shocked out of that perspective into the limited one, as we are introduced to the characters who will feature in the rest of the narrative. Two things I noticed about this on rewatch that I want to point out before I wrap this up:

* In the opening sequence we actually get two different perspectives, Beth’s and Mark’s, with the camera intercutting between them. At first, when they’re both in the house, we don’t notice the difference between their perspectives so much; but there is a key moment where the camera focuses on the lunch Danny didn’t take with him, and you realize the camera is following Beth: she’s the one who notices, she’s the first to be bothered by it. Then she goes off to school with Chloe and Mark walks through town to where Nigel is picking him up, and Beth and Mark’s perspectives separate–and will remain separated for quite some time.

* What happens when the camera follows Mark is truly extraordinary, for multiple reasons. As I am sure others have pointed out, his whole journey through town is done in a single long and no doubt extremely complicated tracking shot: there are no cuts and no edits from the moment Mark runs into Ellie, Joe, and Tom to the moment he gets into the van with Nigel. This technique is forever associated with Orson Welles’s film _Touch of Evil,_ which also opens with a famously long tracking shot; Alfonso Cuaron, who adapted P. D. James’s science fiction novel _Children of Men_ for film, is also a fan of the very long tracking shot. But we’re not doing this just to do it: this shot is a way of demonstrating how small and yet how big Broadchurch the town actually is. It doesn’t take Mark very long to walk through the town center and say hello to practically everyone who lives there. And yet, along the way, he passes by or interacts with nearly everyone who will go on to become a suspect in the upcoming investigation, beginning with Joe and including Susan Wright, the psychic guy, the vicar, and Nigel–and, of course, Mark himself. So we’ve seen the whole town practically in this one shot; but of course we haven’t really seen anything, because each one of these people has a complex personal story which will unspool over the next seven episodes and which will in some way be tangled up in Danny’s death. It will only hit us later, if at all, that in this sequence we have surely been introduced to Danny’s killer–that Mark, in fact, has probably greeted this killer on his walk through the town–but we still don’t know who it is. Because that’s the creepiness of the Christie formula: the killer is drawn from a very limited pool of suspects, all of whom are close to the victim. It’s always someone you know, and usually someone you trust. And all of that is set up in a single shot.

All of this happens, of course, before we really know who Ellie Miller is, and before we’ve even seen Alec Hardy. But they will be in my next meta.





	2. The God's-Eye View

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On rewatch, when one is paying more attention to the details, one can better appreciate the camerawork and the amount of thought put into compositional effects. One also finds, well, fuck-ups, but I’m going to save that for the end. Let me talk first about the few seconds of film that take us from the cold open into the credits.

  * On rewatch, when one is paying more attention to the details, one can better appreciate the camerawork and the amount of thought put into compositional effects. One also finds, well, fuck-ups, but I’m going to save that for the end. Let me talk first about the few seconds of film that take us from the cold open into the credits. Up above is an image which will soon become iconic for this series: Danny Latimer poised precariously at the edge of the cliff that dominates the landscape of Broadchurch, looking down at the sand and the waves. As we are looking at it from above, cliff, beach, and sea are arranged as a series of horizontal stripes, Danny being the only dot that breaks up the composition. Because we’re seeing it from above, three dimensions flattens down to two, and the lethal distance between the top of the cliff and the strip of sand that runs along its base vanishes. As far as our eyes are concerned, Danny could simply step from one band into another, walking casually from dark to light to dark as he drifts up the frame. Our brains, however–because we’ve already seen where he’s standing from angles that communicate the danger much more clearly–recognize the depthlessness of this image as deceptive, and that makes us extremely uneasy.

In fact, however, Danny doesn’t take that step forward. What happens is that he gradually vanishes from the frame as this two-dimensional photographic image dissolves into a nearly identical two-dimensional painting:

Step one: the imposition of the opening title over the strip of sand de-realizes this image; it’s now not a photographic record of actuality but a self-conscious self-identification. Here comes step two:

Danny and the cliff are still there; but he is beginning to disappear as his reality is slowly contaminated by a painting of the landscape he’s standing in. And here…

…Danny has vanished into the unknowable beyond, and we are left with a starkly empty landscape which–because it is compositionally so similar to the shot of him standing by the cliff edge–we don’t immediately recognize as a painting. In fact we don’t truly realize that we’re not looking at the cliff any more until we see Beth wake up:

…and we realize that we’ve been looking for the last little while at a painting that hangs behind Beth’s bed. Which oddly enough happens to look exactly like the landscape from which her son has just vanished.

THAT, my friends, is composition. It may not be as newfangled and arresting as the shit that goes on in _Sherlock_ , but it is a fantastic example of what you can achieve through subtlety. You are affected emotionally by this sequence–which goes by in a matter of seconds–but until you slow it down, you’ll never know why.

OK, Plaidder…it’s pretty, but does it MEAN anything?

Yes, it does…but there are spoilers in that, so let me put it behind a cut tag.

So, first of all, the gradual vanishing of Danny from the frame prefigures the long process of realization that Beth will soon go through, as she gradually becomes aware of the completeness of his absence. First it’s a lunch he didn’t pick up; then it’s an absence from school; then it’s a missed paper route; and finally, she finds that he is so very gone that as soon as she hears that a body has washed up on the beach, she realizes that death is the only thing that can explain Danny’s disappearance from his ordinary life. 

But Beth’s head coming into the shot at this moment is also a conventional cue used to suggest that everything we’ve seen up to this point is Beth’s dream. This is among the first of many indications that _Broadchurch_ is keenly interested in the question of whether there is in fact a God out there to occupy the God’s-eye view of Danny at the cliff edge. One of the people Mark passes during that opening tracking shot is the man who will later go on to claim psychic knowledge of Danny and his murder. Hardy and Miller will ultimately unearth his past fraudulent/harassing/exploitative behavior; but Beth’s behavior in episode 1 predisposes us to take him seriously all the same. Beth’s reaction to hearing that a body has turned up implies some kind of precognition of Danny’s death, whereas Mark is so blithely impervious to this sort of premonition that he is genuinely shocked to discover that the body in the viewing room is actually Danny. Everything the psychic tells Beth, Miller, or Hardy is true: Danny’s body was moved in a boat, the murderer is in fact someone very close to them. 

Of course the fact that these are all fairly reasonable inferences to make from the circumstances of the case protects _Broadchurch_ from the taint of the paranormal–which is important for most mystery plots, which promise a logical and material explanation to a rational problem. But the inclusion of the vicar as a supporting character, his journey with Beth and Mark together and separately, the psychic, Hardy’s occasional theological ruminations–they’re all there to give a cosmic dimension to the investigation into this sudden and apparently arbitrary death of a child. They’re searching for the killer, of course; but this sequence tells us they’re also searching for a more abstract solution, for the answer to the *real* mysteries about death. Which are not so much how did it happen, as what does it mean and why does it happen and where do we go afterward? Is the truth out there? Will we find it?

From a more materialist point of view, however, this sequence tells us the same thing that Mark’s tracking shot tells us: the truth isn’t out there, it’s in here. It’s in your own house, it’s actually in your bedroom, it’s something you look at every day when you get up in the morning. You see the truth all the time. You just aren’t looking at it the right way.

All this is pretty boss, I have to say. But the Broadchurch team is not above technical mistakes. Right after this shot, we see the family in the kitchen getting ready for the day, and there’s this nice artistic shot of Beth and Mark through the kitchen window:

Shots from this perspective are intercut with shots taken from cameras inside the house. Neat effect. It does, however, introduce the possibility of friendly fire, as one camera is accidentally shot by the other:

I was rewatching this and I’m like, “Who is that mysterious stranger strolling across their lawn this early in the morning? Is it Joe? Is it the stalker psychic? Is it a dyspeptic D. I. Alec Hardy? No…no, it’s Camera Two.”

Ah well. Happens to the best of us.





	3. The Worst Cop in Britain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alec Hardy is clearly not “the worst cop in Britain.” But he’s not the best, either. And that’s refreshing, in its own depressing way.

  * D.I. Alec Hardy looks like I feel.

I think this is perhaps the main thing that keeps me attached to Broadchurch. I’m a big fan of Tennant from _Doctor Who,_ on which he played the title character for several years. Tennant’s Doctor, number Ten, was an irrepressible, supercharged dynamo–usually in motion, constantly in the throes of strong feeling, madly in love with a universe against which he also often protests with fists and tears, and ready at a moment’s notice to drop everything and just flat-out run like a demented cheetah. It’s a testament to his versatility that Tennant is just as compelling to me as D. I. Alec Hardy, a middle-aged basket case who has been fed into the bloody hell that is the twenty-first century and then shat out onto the scrapheap. He’s depressed. He’s misanthropic. He’s frequently an asshole. He has nothing to look forward to and no fucks left to give. He can’t even run any more.

I am not, generally, a fan of shows about brooding male assholes; but for Hardy, I do feel a kind of compassion and kinship. I think it’s because I identify with his relationship to failure. Because really, kids, that is what you have to look forward to in middle age: failure. At some point, you stop having potential, and just become a disappointment. Things everyone thought you would accomplish remain undone; and they will forever, now. Growth no longer seems like something you can take for granted. You look ahead and instead what you see is deterioration, stagnation, the gradual abandonment of increasingly unrealistic aspirations. 

And the thing is, the failure is not your fault. Failing is really all you can do, the world being as it is. But you feel responsible anyway–because you are held responsible. That’s Alec Hardy’s world; and it’s also, for very different reasons, mine.

Alec Hardy is clearly not “the worst cop in Britain.” But he’s not the best, either. And that’s refreshing, in its own depressing way.

It’s a longstanding cliche in the British mystery novel that as soon as the name of the primary detective is introduced, people start talking about all the wonderful things he’s already done. Even as early as _The Sign of Four_ , Sherlock Holmes’s names opens doors and knocks down barriers; he’s known and respected in the most unlikely places, even if he’s still a stranger to most of the halls of power and the homes of the respectable. Hercule Poirot’s fame was well-established on the Continent before the Great War sent him and thousands of his fellow Belgians into exile in England. Lord Peter Wimsey is a minor celebrity, for his taste and erudition as well as his ability to recover stolen family jewels and crack other conundrums, when he gets his first murder case. 

_Broadchurch_ inverts this cliche, as it will go on to invert others. Miller’s response to discovering that Hardy is now her boss is, “Why do I know that name?” “He was in charge of the Sandbrook investigation,” says the Chief Super. Miller’s reaction is priceless. She’s heard of Sandbrook; everyone’s heard of Sandbrook. Like Holmes and all the rest of them, Hardy is preceded by his reputation. The twist is that his reputation is terrible.

And the thing is, that reputation is not _entirely_ undeserved. We do discover eventually that the big mistake everyone focused on was not actually his fault. As he tells the Chief Super over their 99s, “I was completely exonerated.” But there were other mistakes that the media never learned about. For instance, it’s pretty clear that Hardy slept with and allowed himself to be played by Claire Ashford; that his fixation on Lee Ashford–not in itself a mistake, as Lee is in fact Pippa’s killer–prevented him from realizing that Claire and Rick were both involved; that he could have done more to find Lisa’s body if he hadn’t been so traumatized by and fixated on the body he actually found. 

I don’t believe that all the details of the Sandbrook case were worked out when Season 1 started filming; but even if you look at what happens during the Latimer investigation, you can see some of his shortcomings. Initially, Joe isn’t even on his radar. For a while, he’s as enthusiastic about Jack as a suspect as the locals are, based on a conviction whose details ought to be a matter of public record, but which he doesn’t learn until Jack is willing to cough them up in interrogation. He can be misdirected almost as easily as the viewers are. He does not inspire loyalty or devotion amongst his subordinates, whom he treats with either silent or vocal contempt. He’s so burnt out by Sandbrook that he has closed himself off to all but the most unavoidable human contact.

And Broadchurch pays a price for that. As much as we’re meant to hate Sharon and Abby for exploiting them during the trial, the mistakes that lead to Joe’s acquittal are real mistakes and Hardy’s responsible for many of them. He shouldn’t have been alone when he arrested Joe–for his own safety, if for no other reason. He shouldn’t have allowed Miller access to Joe after his arrest and interrogation. What I like about this is that both mistakes seem obvious in retrospect, but do not appear as mistakes to us because they are so well-supported by genre conventions. It is, of course, much more dramatic to stage the discovery of Joe the way they’ve done it, with the lone detective stalking his quarry, and the short but quite intense exchange in which the criminal surrenders to the victorious detective, than to do it in a way that would make practical and legal sense. If Hardy were Hercule Poirot, he could have made that choice and there would have been no consequences. Alas, Hardy is not living in an Agatha Christie novel, or an American cop show, and his failure to follow due process therefore has consequences.

Hardy’s decision to allow Miller to confront Joe is also dramatically important–not only for Miller’s character arc but for the trajectory of Hardy and Miller’s relationship. The two of them have gone from open hostility to respectful if wary cooperation over the course of the investigation, and Hardy is genuinely concerned about what the resolution of this investigation will do to Miller. He protects/excludes her from it to the extent that he can–in fact, that’s one of the reasons he’s alone when he arrests Joe–but he realizes he has to be the one to tell her. Hardy has finally made a real human connection with someone–a thing he has probably considered himself incapable of ever since Sandbrook–and it clouds his judgment. He makes that decision purely for Miller’s sake; there’s no possible benefit to the investigation at that point. She’s his one friend in the world, and he gives her something she desperately wants and clearly shouldn’t have, just because he feels so bad for her. It’s the most human thing he does during the entire investigation, and in the moment most viewers probably feel good about it; and yet, it is also his biggest mistake.

So no, Alec Hardy is not a great detective. What you admire in him is not his brilliance or his energy but the sense of responsibility that drags him forward to a redemption he never hoped for and doesn’t even really want. His first reaction to seeing Danny’s body on the beach is so powerful and so well done. “Oh God, don’t do this to me.” You feel the panic, the refusal, the urge to run, to just break down so completely and finally that he’ll be invalided out of the police for good. And yet, for all the camera work, he’s not really disoriented; his focus is already on Danny’s body, which both disrupts and stabilizes his perceptions. As he forces himself to walk forward, the old habits and instincts kick in. By the time Miller shows up, he’s recovered his own detachment sufficiently to berate her for losing hers: “Shut it off. You’re working a case now.”

And that to me is the whole appeal of Hardy’s character. It’s the same appeal that Graham Greene’s protagonists had. He’s lost faith in most of the things that drew him to this job; but even at the very end of his rope, he comes to recognize the job itself as necessary, as a thing that has to be done, and himself as the job’s unworthy and inadequate instrument. He walks toward Danny’s body having lost whatever joy or pleasure he used to take in his job, without any expectation that his job will ever make him feel anything other than horrible, and he does it anyway because he thinks that’s the right thing and the only thing to do. It’s a different kind of heroism, one much more accessible to the viewer than the standard versions we typically encounter in this genre–especially those of us who have hit mid-career.

Ellie Miller, though younger than Hardy, is also approaching mid-career, and she’s got her own failures to deal with. But the arc of their partnership is another story for another time.





	4. I Will Kick You All In The Balls: Or, The Anger of Ellie Miller

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My theory is that what allows Miller to become attached to Hardy–even if she never precisely likes him–is that Hardy’s own misanthropy authorizes her to express an entire range of intense and negative feelings that women are normally not allowed to express anywhere, and especially not at work. My theory, in fact, is that Miller has for the past several years been really, really angry, but has been keeping that fact a secret from everyone around her, including herself. Though it bothers her, at first, that she can’t extract the tiniest iota of niceness or the smallest friendly gesture from him, as they get deeper into the Latimer investigation she comes to recognize his hostility as something she shares, and even more so, as something she needs.

In our last installment, I spent some time talking about the hot mess that is D. I. Alec Hardy. D. S. Miller is introduced to us as someone who is far closer to having her shit together. She’s got a lovely home, a rewarding job, a supportive husband, two cute kids, and a promotion on the way. Her first act on returning to work is to distribute presents to everyone on her staff. She seems like a superwoman–having it all, doing it all well, a bit driven of course but good-hearted and nice as pie.

Then she finds out the promotion she was up for went to a man from out of town whose last major case was a total shitshow. And before too long, she’s saying things like, “So help me, I will piss in a cup and throw it at you.”

Behind the cut tag lies a spoiler-laced discussion of the development of Hardy and Miller’s working relationship. I’m just going to warn you now that I don’t ship them, though of course I’m aware that there must be legions of Broadchurchers out there who do. I’m more interested in the question of how they wind up becoming functional as colleagues. I happen to be interested, for no particular reason, in the question of how as a professional woman you cope with a male superior who presents every appearance of being a complete asshole.

My theory is that what allows Miller to become attached to Hardy–even if she never precisely _likes_ him–is that Hardy’s own misanthropy authorizes her to express an entire range of intense and negative feelings that women are normally not allowed to express anywhere, and especially not at work. My theory, in fact, is that Miller has for the past several years been really, really angry, but has been keeping that fact a secret from everyone around her, including herself. Though it bothers her, at first, that she can’t extract the tiniest iota of niceness or the smallest friendly gesture from him, as they get deeper into the Latimer investigation she comes to recognize his hostility as something she shares, and even more so, as something she needs.  

At one point, while they’re down by the caravans, Miller and Hardy pass some children playing soccer (I’m sorry, FOOTBALL), and Miller tries to get them to involve her in the game. They, of course, just stare at her as she walks past. “You overcompensate,” Hardy mutters to her. Miller replies, “I _know._ ”

We know too, because we’ve seen that from day one with her. Her first action after returning to work is to distribute gifts she got for everyone in the office while she was on holiday. Of course it’s a nice gesture; but some of the gifts are a trifle awkward (”lip gloss…for all your kissing”) or inappropriate (the guy who gets the penguin looks perplexed and sort of peeved). She’s not doing this because she actually knows them that well; it’s part of her management style, just like making sure everyone goes out to celebrate someone’s last day. This kind of thing does matter–they all certainly like her better than they like Hardy, or as they nickname him, Shitface–but it doesn’t create real emotional relationships. All it does, really, is generate a reservoir of goodwill that you can drawn on when you need someone to do you a favor right before a deadline.

What’s she overcompensating for? Well, in the workplace, undoubtedly, it’s partly just for being a woman. But, as we eventually discover at the end of season 1, there’s a much darker answer to this question. Miller is married to a guy who on the surface looks like the perfect stay at home dad, and is actually one of the most fucked up human beings on the planet. The fact that he’s able to conceal his guilt from her throughout a two-month investigation suggests that he’s already used to compartmentalizing around her. He has a personality that he allows Ellie to see, and then there’s another personality responsible for things like what happened to Danny Latimer. She’s been married for at least 12 years to a man she doesn’t _really_ know. He’s probably very good at making it seem like he loves her. Most days he probably actually believes that he does. And yet the heart and the body are smarter about some things than the brain is; and Miller must know, in some way beyond the cognitive, that he’s not giving her what she needs. Even worse, his love for her is so _apparently_ constant, he is so _apparently_ supportive and caring, that she has no visible or overt reason to be angry with him for being someone who can’t _actually_  love her. But she is. She must be. All the time. Not understanding where the anger comes from, Miller has two things she can do with it: turn it outward against people other than Joe, or bottle it up in herself.

Losing the job to Hardy gives Miller an explicit reason to be angry; and this is incredibly liberating for her, though of course she doesn’t realize it. Initially, she repairs to the loo to call Joe and cry. He’s undoubtedly being ‘supportive’ on the other end, but it doesn’t help; she’s still miserable, defeated, and isolated. Around Hardy’s bitterness and sarcasm, on the other hand, Miller expands, flourishes even. Hardy is initially astonished by her refusal to even shake his hand–”You want to do this NOW?”–but they both discover, quickly, that each of them can rely on and feed off the other’s anger. Hardy, after all, nearly has a panic attack when he first sees Danny’s body. Having an enraged Miller to confront allows him to snap right back into professional mode. Miller, meanwhile, is initially overwhelmed and unglued by the identity of the victim, but when Hardy tells her to “shut it off,” he actually enables her to do it–because at that moment, for Miller, it’s goodbye shock and grief, hello don’t tell me what to do you miserable fucker.

And weird as it is, this mutual hostility is not only what makes the relationship work, but what enables both of them to keep it together long enough to solve the murder. As long as each is being pissed off by the other, s/he is prevented from descending further into his/her personal hell. And they discover, and we discover, that since each of them is committed to the job in an impersonal and somewhat joyless way, they are still doing their jobs together even as they hate at each other. From their first meeting on the beach, Hardy is mentoring Miller, even though to Miller this often feels more like tormenting. He shoots down her request to lead the first meeting with the Latimers; she’s pissed off about it, but when she is actually in the meeting, she discovers that he was right: a) there’s no way to make it better and b) she’s so overwhelmed by everyone’s grief that it’s lucky she’s not also trying to run the meeting. She’s pissed off at him for telling her, on no notice at all, to lead the team meeting with the outside personnel; but later on, when Hardy’s in the hospital, she’s able to do it again on short notice with no fuss or bother. Miller, meanwhile, is doing her best to advance the investigation and to support her superior–partly by recognizing his self-neglect and trying to do something about it.

All of this comes together quite deliciously in the scene during which Miller invites Hardy over for dinner. Miller’s doing this because that’s what Joe suggests that she always does: “Smother him with kindness.” That’s a particularly revealing line coming from Joe, and gives you some idea of the buried resentments and passive-aggressions that Ellie’s been the secret target of for the past decade or so. Ellie tries; but with Hardy, she can’t do it with a smile the way she would with anyone else. So it becomes this very intense and very funny confrontation, in which Ellie really is trying to do something for him that he really needs, and Hardy is trying to appreciate it, but the only ground on which they can actually meet is their shared resentment and frustration of these social conventions that have to be followed even when you don’t feel like it.

Anyway, my point I guess is that this is a different take on the whole you-hate-each-other-so-much-you-must-really-like-each-other thing–first, because they’re not actually a romantic relationship (in canon), and second, because the anger isn’t treated as an inauthentic mask for a more genuine affection/attraction. Anger is actually the content and substance of their friendship, not just the form. They help each other, not by being nice to each other, but by validating each other’s anger. For each of them, anger is a more honest and more healthy expression of an ongoing trauma which has already manifested, for both of them, in more harmful and incapacitating ways. 

It’s very unusual, still, to see a female character allowed to be as angry as Ellie Miller gets and still remain sympathetic. Beth’s character, too, is allowed to maintain her anger, to defend her right to it and to argue that anger is healthy for her, that it will see her through this nightmare. This is a new departure in characterization, and ultimately more important, in terms of breaking down gender typing, than any 500 ninja assassin “strong” Moffat women.

Of course, in the final episode, when Miller finally realizes what she’s REALLY angry about, the fact that she’s no longer inhibiting her anger becomes a problem–one that Hardy, because of the journey he’s been on with her, fails to forsee. “What am I going to do to him?” she says, when Hardy cautions her against touching Joe and jeopardizing the conviction. “He’s bigger than me and there’s cameras everywhere.” Probably she believes at the time that she can handle it. But it’s when he claims to have always loved her that she starts attacking him. He’s articulated the lie that is the source of all her rage; and she can’t keep it in the bottle any more. Miller’s anger, really, becomes the main plot engine of Season 2, given that it’s the reason the confession gets excluded and the courtroom drama becomes possible.


	5. You Say You Want A Resolution

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Resolution is supposed to provide consolation. That’s what’s driving Hardy and Miller, dragging them through 60 days of slogging and bickering and paranoia and grinding despair: the desire to console the Latimers by providing them with some answers, with a target for their anger, with the promise of justice done to the person who hurt them so badly. But this is another one of those ways in which Broadchurch pushes the realism farther than most cop shows. Knowing who the killer is doesn’t make anyone on this show feel any better. Poor D. I. Hardy can’t catch a break. Failure is terrible. But success, in this case, is almost worse.

  * So this is D. I. Alec Hardy, alone in his office. He’s just cracked the case, and he knows it. And does he look happy? No. He does not.

I understand the buzz about season 2 was that it just wasn’t as good as season 1. I’ve seen both. I think season 2 has its merits; but the bottom line is, no season of _Broadchurch_ will ever be as good as season 1. That’s because the final episode of season 1 is a fucking masterpiece, largely because of who the killer turns out to be. And unfortunately, it’s a masterpiece that can neither be repeated nor superseded, because this is a plot you can only do once.

Resolution is supposed to provide consolation. That’s what’s driving Hardy and Miller, dragging them through 60 days of slogging and bickering and paranoia and grinding despair: the desire to console the Latimers by providing them with some answers, with a target for their anger, with the promise of justice done to the person who hurt them so badly. But this is another one of those ways in which _Broadchurch_ pushes the realism farther than many another mystery show does. Knowing who the killer is doesn’t make anyone on this show feel any better. Poor D. I. Hardy can’t catch a break. Failure is terrible. But success, in this case, is almost worse.

Spoilers, obviously, follow.

What I like about this episode is that the ‘twist’, while I am sure it came as a surprise to many, isn’t really the point of it. Unlike some other showrunners I could mention, they don’t delay the reveal until the last 5 minutes just to keep everyone in suspense. Whether you saw it coming or not, the revelation that Joe is the killer is not the main business of the finale. It’s all about what happens afterward.

And although we can argue about whether Joe is even possible as a character, or whether the sleeping-with-the-killer thing is inherently and kind of cheaply sensational, one thing you can’t argue with–I mean you could, but I’ll fight you–is the compelling power of the scenes in which Hardy and Miller try to cope with this information. Poor Hardy; he’s worked so hard, he’s got what he wanted, and it just makes him miserable. His response to discovering that it’s Joe is a simple, angry, heartfelt, “SHIT!” When he actually finds Joe in the shed with Danny’s phone, he doesn’t even speak; he just sighs. His affect in the interview with Joe is flatter than it’s ever been. He’s there; he’s asking the questions; they’re rote questions, questions that he’s probably asked other men who abuse and kill children before, and when Joe protests, all he can say is, “We need to understand what happened.” No doubt he’d like to. No doubt he really, really wants to be able to present Miller with a reading of this case that makes sense, when he finally tells her. But he seems to already know that he won’t, even though he’s going through the motions, hoping maybe something will surprise him.

His interactions with Miller during this episode are just straight-up heartbreaking. Hardy obviously goes into this day knowing that Joe is the killer. But he can’t let Miller know that, and he also can’t let her know that he knows, and he also can’t let her be part of the resolution to the case. So on the one hand, Hardy is being more duplicitous–more *successfully*–than he ever has before in this episode. In the interview with Tom, he keeps the focus on Tom, but everything that happens in that interview is obviously meant to increase the pressure on Joe–not only by making him fear that Tom will be sacrificed to protect him, but by reminding Joe that on top of all the other horrible things he’s responsible for, he deeply hurt his own son by coming between him and his best friend. He deliberately distracts Miller by pretending that he’s pissed off about the loss of Nigel Carter, purely to keep her busy while he goes after her husband. He plays Miller, because he has to, and he hates doing it.

At the same time, once he recognizes what this is going to do to Miller, he begins treating her with a compassion and even an honesty that we’ve never seen from him. The man who didn’t even want to answer a question about whether he was married or not calls Miller down to the beach and starts talking to her about his unhappy childhood. He maneuvers her away from the phone tracking part of the investigation while also giving her the only real praise he’s ever offered. This, of course, makes her uncomfortable; probably she’s thinking the only reason he could be treating her this way is that he’s learned that she’s dying or something.

When he finally tells her, his physicality with her is completely different from anything before. He knows, of course, that he can’t make it better. What he’s trying to do is make it so that she doesn’t have to be completely alone. She can see this change happening and it terrifies her, because anything that can make Alec Hardy be kind to her must be pretty hideous. “Why are you coming round here?” Miller says, anxiously, as he crosses to sit next to her. He’s always demanded more than his share of personal space from her, but his consciousness of her suffering-to-be overrides his own pride and fear. When she gets the information from him, she tries to literally vomit it back out, and he’s over there in the corner with her, putting a hand on her shoulder, not because it will make anything better but so she can feel at least that to him, she’s not untouchable now. And she hates this news, she probably hates him for telling her, undoubtedly she hates him for finding it out in the first place; but she lets him do it. This moment is the payoff for all that hostility in the first seven episodes. They’ve been as ugly as people can be to each other and they’re still partners who have somehow managed to build up a certain amount of trust–though only a certain amount. (Miller, for instance, hasn’t told Hardy about the check she wrote to Lucy, something about which he will be rightfully FURIOUS in season 2.) Not in spite but because of all the bile vented between them over the past two months, Hardy’s the only person Miller could bear to have in the room with her at this moment. Her husband, of course, is out. With Tom she would have to be strong, as she is later in her conversation with him. Her best friend is now the mother of the boy her husband killed. She’s lost everyone close to her, in one way or another. “God will put you in the right place,” Hardy remembers his mother telling him. Well, this is one of the things God’s been sparing him for, evidently: to be here, now, to offer Miller the only support she could possibly receive at a time when she desperately needs it.

So we, at least, as viewers get something out of this resolution. Nobody else likes it. The Latimers are horrified by it. Even the irrepressible Olly hears the news from Lucy and ages 20 years in that instant. It doesn’t heal, it doesn’t put anything right, and it doesn’t even resolve the mystery. Because now we know what happened; but nobody, including the killer, knows why. “People are unknowable,” Hardy finally tells Miller. That’s basically the Broadchurch motto.

So how do you top that? The premise of season 1 is not repeatable. There’s no one close enough to either Ellie or Hardy to pin another murder like this on. Broadchurch, as a town with one of the lowest crime rates in the area, can’t keep having a new sensational killing every year. Like Hardy and Miller themselves, _Broadchurch_ ’s success contains the bitter seeds of failure. But then again, that’s why people love it.





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